Kochtopus: Corporate Oil, Tea Party and Mormon Ideology

Note from Suzie-Q:

This is an older article but relevant to what we are seeing at the gas pumps today and the busting of Unions… And, let’s not forget the Tea Party;  guns, God and gold.

Tea Party movement influenced by corporate oil and Mormon ideology

Examiner- Ron Bynum

January 25th, 2010 11:03 am PT

The Tea Party movement’s supporters think they are a grass roots movement, but their ideology of guns, God and gold reeks of the Mormon (LDS) philosophy, and they receive support from big oil in the form of the Koch brothers, owners of the nation’s largest private energy company.

At the Tea Partier’s rallies, there are many placards and signs citing their trust in guns, God, and gold, a mantra that Glen Beck of Fox News uses, and it appears that Beck, a Mormon (convert in 1999), is proselytizing his faith when he uses that phrase.

The brothers Charles and David Koch, of Koch Industries, are major contributors to the Heritage Foundation, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and the Cato Institute, and are a major funding source for lobbying groups that deny climate change, and spent more than $8.5 million to stop “cap and trade” because it will cost them big profits. That is the real motivation behind the Tea Party movement, and healthcare reform is a scare tactic and rallying cry to upset ignorant followers and divide the country.

In Modesto, supporters of the Tea Party movement are clueless about the source of their alleged grass roots movement, and believe their liberties are at risk. Many protestors at rallies in the park proclaimed the government would take their guns, restrict their religious freedoms, and increase their taxes. The local gun club posted signs that “Obama’s going to take all your guns away so get them now and don’t register them.”

Religious fanatics claim liberals want to take God out of government and schools, even though God is not allowed in government or schools. Tea Party supporters fervently believe the lies ultra-conservative fear mongers like Sarah Palin and Fox News’ commentators spread, and neo-cons incite Tea Party protestors who remain ignorant of the origins, money, and real brains driving their movement.

It is sad that ignorant, frightened people believe their freedoms are at risk from the legally elected government of the United States. It is also sad these folks who think they are defenders of liberty are really shills for energy companies who will not share their ill-gotten profits with the Tea Party people.

David Koch proclaimed at one event that they are “fighting for the economic freedoms that made our nation the most prosperous society in history.” Koch’s only concern is higher profits earned on the backs of the Tea Party people, and they happily bend over for the shaft as Koch goes to the bank.

In Modesto and around the country, when Tea Party protestors make statements to the media and interviewers, they claim they fight for their liberty, ‘guns, God and gold,’ while they scream NO to affordable health care. They do not know whom the Heritage Foundation, Cato Institute or the Koch brothers are, and have no idea the oil industry is pushing their agenda on them in the guise of preserving personal liberty.

Continue reading on Examiner.com: Tea Party movement influenced by corporate oil and Mormon ideology – Modesto Political Issues | Examiner.com http://www.examiner.com/political-issues-in-modesto/tea-party-movement-influenced-by-corporate-oil-and-mormon-ideology#ixzz1GaHYfp3F

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Who Is Behind The Tea Party Movement?

New York Billionaires Behind The Tea Party Movement

Posted in Liberaland by Alan • August 23, 2010, 3:20 PMET

The myth of the tea party being a grassroots movement takes another hit, as the New Yorker‘s Jane Mayer looks a the Koch brothers, Charles and David, who fund much of the tea party movement (via Glynnis MacNichol).

The Kochs operate oil refineries in Alaska, Texas, and Minnesota, and control some four thousand miles of pipeline. Koch Industries owns Brawny paper towels, Dixie cups, Georgia-Pacific lumber, Stainmaster carpet, and Lycra, among other products. Forbes ranks it as the second-largest private company in the country, after Cargill, and its consistent profitability has made David and Charles Koch—who, years ago, bought out two other brothers—among the richest men in America. Their combined fortune of thirty-five billion dollars is exceeded only by those of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett.

The Kochs are longtime libertarians who believe in drastically lower personal and corporate taxes, minimal social services for the needy, and much less oversight of industry—especially environmental regulation. These views dovetail with the brothers’ corporate interests. In a study released this spring, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst’s Political Economy Research Institute named Koch Industries one of the top ten air polluters in the United States. And Greenpeace issued a report identifying the company as a “kingpin of climate science denial.” The report showed that, from 2005 to 2008, the Kochs vastly outdid ExxonMobil in giving money to organizations fighting legislation related to climate change, underwriting a huge network of foundations, think tanks, and political front groups. Indeed, the brothers have funded opposition campaigns against so many Obama Administration policies—from health-care reform to the economic-stimulus program—that, in political circles, their ideological network is known as the Kochtopus.

Mayer’s article discusses some ugly family roots. Father Fred did business with Stalin, but later came to regret it, and became  one of the original members of the John Birch Society.

He wrote admiringly of Benito Mussolini’s suppression of Communists in Italy, and disparagingly of the American civil-rights movement. “The colored man looms large in the Communist plan to take over America,” he warned. Welfare was a secret plot to attract rural blacks to cities, where they would foment “a vicious race war.” In a 1963 speech that prefigures the Tea Party’s talk of a secret socialist plot, Koch predicted that Communists would “infiltrate the highest offices of government in the U.S. until the President is a Communist, unknown to the rest of us.”

Mayer’s piece discusses the links between Fred’s views and those of his sons. Buried deep in the article  is an example of how money trumps everything. David Koch, a prostate cancer survivor, has given generously to cancer research.

Koch’s corporate and political roles, however, may pose conflicts of interest. For example, at the same time that David Koch has been casting himself as a champion in the fight against cancer, Koch Industries has been lobbying to prevent the E.P.A. from classifying formaldehyde, which the company produces in great quantities, as a “known carcinogen” in humans.

SOURCE

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Koch Industries founded Americans for Prosperity, formed as a successor to Citizens for a Sound Economy. Fred Koch co-founded the John Birch Society. In the mid-1970s the Kochs started to fund a network of libertarian organizations including the United States Libertarian Party, for which David ran as the vice presidential nominee in 1980.^[47][48] The Kochs withdrew their financial support of the Libertarian Party after an acrimonious 1983 convention,^[49] but continue to support libertarian institutions independent of the party such as the Cato Institute, and more recently have been major contributers to the Tea Party movement.

To advance the work of the Republican Governors Association, Koch Industries made a $1 million donation to the group in 2010

WIKIPEDIA: MORE INFO ON THE KOCH BROTHERS

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